New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio speaks with participants after he attending a convention beside a demonstration against the G20 economic summit during a protest march on July 08, 2017 in Hamburg, Germany | Morris MacMatzen/Getty Images

De Blasio faces Germany trip backlash

The political backlash to de Blasio’s trip has been led by the city’s law enforcement unions and is being fueled by the tabloids.

NEW YORK — Mayor Bill de Blasio went to Germany last week to make a statement and join protests against Donald Trump at the G-20 summit in Hamburg — but he ended up with dozens of police officers turning their backs on him at a Tuesday funeral for a murdered member of NYPD’s own.

The political backlash to de Blasio’s trip — he decided to jet off to Germany just a day after the officer, Miosotis Familia, was ambushed while sitting in a police vehicle — has been led by the city’s law enforcement unions and is being fueled by the tabloids. The controversy reached a boiling point on Monday when President Donald Trump retweeted a Fox News story critical of the mayor’s decision to travel.

Republican strategists have piled on, looking to puncture de Blasio’s aura of political invincibility ahead of November elections. The strategy is unlikely to work, but underscores the mayor’s continuing struggle to define a politically relevant role on the national stage while balancing the day to day requirements of his job as mayor back in the city.

“The optics of it are just terrible,” said Republican political consultant Tom Doherty, who is a partner at Mercury Public Affairs and a former aide to Gov. George Pataki.

Speaking at the funeral, de Blasio sought to make his support for the police force more explicit after days of negative headlines and a barrage of tabloid front pages criticizing his decision to travel.

“We’re here to support each other, we’re here to support her family and most importantly we are here to honor all that she stood for, all she believed in, all she did. We grieve with this extraordinary family,” de Blasio said, standing at a lectern in the Bronx draped with an image of Familia. “We must help our police in every way just as we ask them to help us in our moment of need. I say to all of us, if someone threatens a police office — any time, in person or online — we need to alert the police to that threat. If an officer is in danger we must help them.”

De Blasio has said that he only committed to the foreign trip after he learned that he would not miss Familia's funeral.

But the juxtaposition of de Blasio appearing in Germany near foreign protesters hurling rocks at their own police forces gave fuel to de Blasio’s likely Republican mayoral opponent, Nicole Malliotakis, who faces long odds of winning election in November.

“New Yorkers and the media need to ask Bill de Blasio a simple question; are you using City Hall as merely a soap box for a run for the 2020 national Democratic ticket,” Malliotakis said in a press release.

Ed Mullins, president of the NYPD's sergeants union, said this past weekend that de Blasio had failed to show “any kind of leadership" after Familia’s murder.

“New York City is right now mourning the loss of a police officer who was dedicated to the City of New York, and we have our mayor who has just gone to Germany to join protesters. Is this the type of city we want to live in?” Mullins said in a radio appearance over the weekend.

The liberal de Blasio, of course, has long had a complicated, and often frosty, relationship with the NYPD. He ran on a promise to reform the police department and end the overuse of the “Stop and Frisk” method of policing even amid his administration’s push to invest millions of dollars in the force, increase the headcount and resolve outstanding labor contracts.

The scene on Tuesday was reminiscent — if not as pronounced — as the protest at a funeral held for police officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, who were ambushed and killed while sitting in a patrol car in Brooklyn in 2014, during de Blasio's first year in office.

During that funeral, de Blasio was greeted by protesting officers who turned their backs en masse as he spoke. Earlier, police union leaders had led officers in turning their backs on de Blasio when he visited the injured officers at a hospital in Brooklyn.

De Blasio has called the recent criticisms of his foreign trip "an attempt to politicize" Familia's death.

A spokesman for the mayor dismissed the extent of the protesting officers on Tuesday, which occurred as hundreds of officers from around the nation and other countries descended on the Bronx Tuesday, lining several blocks along the Grand Concourse and ending up at 187 Street, site of the World Changers Church of New York, where the funeral was held.

Officers from as far as Dubai lined up in single file as the casket carrying Familia was carried out by the funeral procession, and silence fell over the typically buzzing intersection as her family and several elected and department officials said their final goodbyes.

"A couple dozen people showed up to partake in a bogus controversy ginned up by the media and those looking to politicize Detective Familia's death. That's unfortunate," said Austin Finan, a spokesperson for the mayor.

Police Commissioner James O’Neill struck a more audibly frustrated tone, his voice breaking several times. “Hate has consequences. When we demonize a whole group of people, whether that people is defined by race, by religion or by their occupation this is the result. I don’t know how else to say it, this was an act of hate against police officers,” O’Neill said.

Ultimately, the episode is unlikely to do fatal damage to de Blasio’s re-election effort.

“He does it because politically he feels like he can get away with it in New York,” Doherty said of de Blasio’s trip. With voter registration that overwhelmingly favors his re-election, de Blasio “can do stuff that normal politicians would worry about,” Doherty said, noting that in New York City, Democrats outnumber Republicans by a factor of 6:1.

Still, Jeanne Zaino, a professor of political science at Iona College, noted that “even amongst his supporters, they scratched their heads in terms of what the upside was for him with this trip, both strategically and politically.”

De Blasio’s national and international trips have never gone over particularly well with New Yorkers. A Quinnipiac poll taken in May 2015 showed a plurality of New Yorkers felt de Blasio’s involvement with national politics was distracting him from his duties at home.

But that hasn’t stopped the mayor from pursuing his national ambitions, and it’s not the first time de Blasio has left New York City at a time when political observers and residents felt he ought to have stayed home.

He embarked on a tour of the Midwest in spring 2015, touring Iowa and Wisconsin to spread his national political platform, in hopes of pushing the Democratic presidential candidates, specifically Hillary Clinton, to the left on economic issues.

Pundits scratched their heads when he jetted to Rome for a few days for a conference on climate change and income inequality summer of 2015, while his administration was negotiating a controversial deal with ride-hailing company Uber.

And in late February of 2016, he made an unsolicited trip to Iowa to canvass for Hillary Clinton in that state’s caucus, while back home, legislation he brokered to significantly curtail the presence of horse-drawn carriages on city streets was falling apart.

De Blasio sought and received approval from the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board for the Germany trip, some of the costs of which were paid for with city funds, because it achieved a “city purpose,” the board said.

But New Yorkers likely won’t buy that rationale, Zaino said.

“It’s an argument that he’s tried to make and he’s trying to make, but it’s a stretch for residents to imagine that going over to Germany and joining in these protests is in some way assisting New York City,” she said.